Parallel Session 3.11: Performative Experiments in Geoengineering

Thursday, 14:00 - 15:30

02 I Elysium

When artists perform experiments they elicit very different responses from the public than when scientists do. Our panel, Performative Experiments in Geoengineering, opens up a space for transdisciplinary conversation engaging conference participants in the performance and observation of a small scale artistic experiment that maps choreographies and protocols of the climate engineering field: a staging of a performance and observation of an experiment depicted in the painting ‘Experiment on a bird in the air pump’.

Karolina Sobecka is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. Her recent projects focus on climate engineering as a way of investigating the values that drive technological innovation, and shape the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature.

Dehlia Hannah is a philosopher and curator based in Copenhagen. She is Research Curator at the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University, Denmark and affiliated faculty with the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She holds Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University with specializations in philosophy of science and aesthetic theory. Dehlia deploys her philosophical training to write about and curate art exhibitions that explore environmental imaginaries and epistemologies. Her current book project, entitled Performative Experiments, articulates the philosophical implications of contemporary artworks that take the form of scientific experiments and deploy scientific methods and materials as new media. She is currently principle investigator and curator of A Year Without a Winter, a three-year, transdisciplinary thought experiment about climate change conducted on the bicentennial of the Tambora climate crisis of 1815-18, the results of which are forthcoming from Columbia University Press in spring 2018.

Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research interests include agroecology and climate-smart agriculture, energy landscapes, land use change, new media, and science and technology studies. She has written on several aspects of climate engineering, including humanitarian and development approaches to geoengineering, gender considerations, and the social implications of scaling up negative emissions. Her book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso Books, 2019) looks at best-case scenarios for carbon removal and solar geoengineering. She holds a doctorate in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Oliver Morton writes about scientific and technological change and their effects. He concentrates particularly on the understanding and imagining of planetary processes.

He is a senior editor at The Economist, responsible for the magazine’s briefings and essays. He was previously Chief News and Features Editor at Nature and editor of Wired UK, and has contributed to a wide range of other publications. He writes on subjects from quantum physics to synthetic biology to moviemaking; his articles have been anthologised and won awards.

He is the author of three books: Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World (2002), which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award; Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (2007), a book of the year in The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement; and The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (2015), longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. In The Sunday Times Bryan Appleyard described it as “ambitious, enthralling and slightly strange”.

He is an honorary professor in Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at UCL and has a degree in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. He lives with his wife in Greenwich, England, and Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named in his honour.

Forrest Clingerman, Associate Professor at Ohio Northern University (USA), is a specialist in how Christian thought engages environmental issues. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa. His scholarly works interrogate how religion and philosophy add to our understanding of such things as climate change, geoengineering, local ethics, and the meaning of place. He is co-editor of Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering (Lexington Books, 2016) and Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham University Press, 2014).